Week 5 Fantasy Football Sneaky Starts & Sleepers

Oct 02, 2024

Trevor Ruszkowski-Imagn Images

All but the luckiest fantasy owners at some point need to find the proverbial diamond in the rough—a waiver wire or bench player capable of putting up some points in a pinch. This weekly feature is dedicated to that part of fantasy football. It's not pretty, but it's part of the game.

I’ll put the defense’s aFPA (adjusted fantasy points allowed) rank in parentheses below. As of Week 4, we are now using only 2024 data for our signature strength of schedule metric, which makes it a great apples-to-apples comparison of each defensive matchup.

Last week’s Sneaky Starts featured Jared Goff (QB4), Justin Fields (QB1), Geno Smith (QB8), Sam Darnold (QB9), Chuba Hubbard (RB7), Zack Moss (RB17), Jerome Ford (RB22), Diontae Johnson (WR9), Jayden Reed (WR2), Tre Tucker (WR25), Jauan Jennings (WR31), Rashid Shaheed (WR22), Christian Kirk (WR16), Wan'Dale Robinson (WR28), Dallas Goedert (TE7), Jake Ferguson (TE8), Pat Freiermuth (TE3), and Tucker Kraft (TE2).

Let’s see who might surprise this week:

Quarterbacks

Geno Smith, Seahawks (vs. NYG, 6)

Through four games, Smith is the fantasy QB8, and under new OC Ryan Grubb, he’s getting back to the sort of production that made him a solid QB1 during the 2022 season. The Giants have given up 16+ fantasy points to enemy quarterbacks in each of the last two games.